Four decades after the end of the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese government official makes a speech echoing the Red Guard’s ultra-leftist sentiment. Could “politics in command” be experiencing a renaissance?

Liu Xia, a poet and wife of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, has been under house arrest since October 2010. In this video, secretly recorded in December, Liu reads two of her new works.

Independent Chinese PEN Center president, Tienchi Martin-Liao, reflects on the five-year anniversary of imprisonment of dissident writer and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, his wife’s prolonged, Kafkaesque house arrest, the calls for solidarity from Chinese human rights activists, and the power of words.

In the wake of a recent wave of arrests aimed to smother free speech in China, Tienchi Martin-Liao examines the laws most frequently used to charge dissidents and influential social media voices, and how they’ve been modified to include new offenses.

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About Sampsonia Way

Sampsonia Way is an online magazine sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh that seeks to protect and advocate for writers who may be endangered, to educate the public about threats to writers and literary expression, and to create a community in which endangered writers thrive and literary culture is a valued part of life.